Topical Tropes

These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.

Alt-itis: Playing alternate characters is commonplace for many players. It lets them play the game through different playstyles and even experience different types of content and cities that their main may not have been able to access.

Best Known for the Fanservice: A lot of people knew Everquest as "that game which always has that blonde girl on the cover". In fact, SOE's decision to use the expansion's main antagonist on the box art instead of Firiona Vie may be because Everquest was getting bad press over their reliance on Sexy Packaging.

Best Level Ever: If you played EQ, you probably had at least one zone you liked to visit on occasion just because it was so durn pretty. And in EQ2, not only does the same apply but you don't even have to worry about getting swamped under a mob of grey cons.

You know those vaguely caricatured statements on how people denigrated the changes that streamlined the game? There are people who actually, honestly think that the level of misery the game engendered was good for it.

And the funny thing is, their complaints are right in a very specific sense - back in the days of misery, you got good or you gave up. Of course, softening the games blows made it more accessible to casual players (that in and of itself bothers some people), and the calamities the old ways would have caused, such as a raid wipe in Veeshan's Peak, are no longer the kind that literally cause players to quit the game. The utter bastardry of the game also engendered a kind of camaraderie, since you were forced to work together with other players just to have a chance.

Several details regarding the game's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, drew a lot of ire from the player base due to what felt like forced incentive to buy the expansion.

When it was first released, all of the zones from the expansion boasted an experience bonus, meaning anyone not able to travel to the expansion's areas was at a disadvantage while leveling up.

The new playable race, Iksar, were seen as severely overpowered at the time. They were the only other race (besides humans) that could play as monks and they had a higher natural armor class as well as innate health regeneration, started off with maxed swimming skill and could hold their breath underwater for an extremely long time. The developers claimed that these benefits were offset by the fact that every other race would attack them on sight, but given that city factions mean practically nothing at the endgame and the fact that Iksar could easily hit the level cap without ever leaving their home continent, it wasn't much of a drawback.

Another drawback stated by the developers was that Iksar couldn't wear plate armor. However, their natural AC bonus offset this somewhat, and since they got their own alternate chainmail version of the class-specific plate armors anyway, it didn't hinder anyone. They eventually tossed that idea out the window soon after anyway, and now Iksar can wear most plate armor without restriction.

Lake of Ill Omen, one of the starting zones for new Iksar players, could take a player all the way from level 1 to their mid 30s, and was located adjacent to the Iksar city. Adjacent to that zone was another that could take you to the mid 40s, and within that zone was a dungeon that could take you to the level cap. It really took all of the sting out of that whole "you're hated on other continents" drawback the Iksar supposedly had.

Complacent Gaming Syndrome: This happened a lot, especially when it comes to zones. For example, back in the mid 2000s when grouping was still necessary, most players parked inside Paludal Caverns until they were in their mid 20s levelwise, and never budged. It's also a vicious cycle - people wanted to group and so they hung out in Paludal because all the groups were there, so more people went to Paludal, so even more of the groups were there... of course, now there are so few newbies that groups below level 90 don't really exist anymore, and SOE changes the "hot zone" semi-regularly to keep a wider assortment of zones worth exploring.

Ensemble Darkhorse: Fippy Darkpaw, a level six gnoll who repeatedly committed suicide by charging headlong at the gates of Qeynos (which were guarded by level 50 guards). As the joke went, "Who wants to see The Fabled Fippy Darkpaw finally hack his way into Qeynos and take revenge for all those years of torment?"

Not exactly a joke, since there was a Fabled Fippy Darkpaw during an event, who managed to get inside Qeynos. Many other Fabled creatures appeared, such as Fabled Ambassor D'vinn, or Fabled Garanel Ruskiff.

Fippy later reappeared in Underfoot as a raid boss, where it was revealed that his true form became more powerful every time he was felled in Qeynos.

Back in the old days, Everquest had "hell levels", so called because the way the experience was calculated caused certain levels to take ages to clear. Specifically, multiples of 5 (30, 35, 40, etc...). This was removed after SOE took over from Verant Interactive and, among other changes, redid the experience mechanics.

This was even more painful when the game included class-based experience penalties, which were 10% for arcane spell-casters, 20% for monks, and a whopping 40% for "hybrid" (ranger, paladin, shadow knight, and bard) classes! Combined with racial penalties, this could result in an overall experience penalty as hefty as 68%! It was not uncommon to hear of some race/class combinations (Troll Shadow Knight, anyone?) having to grind for days just to escape a hell level.

Trains. The provider of the page quote. Trains happen when a player or group is overwhelmed or overmatched and are forced to flee to the zone line, which the mobs cannot cross. The group of monsters that attacked them, as well as any that get picked up during the run, are the train. Trains can mean instant death to any unprepared adventurer in their path, and since the death penalty was so steep and trains were always someone else's fault...

This was particularly bad for creatures that have "frenzied agro", meaning they would always attack the nearest target if the focus of their hatred moved out of range. This meant that sometimes, you'd be killed by the train even if the person responsible for it was still in the zone! Undead in particular were known for having frenzied agro mechanics.

Special mention goes to Estate Of Unrest for being train hell. If you got within a certain range of any single mob in the house, you would bring the entire house down upon your group's heads. And if someone else pulled the house and trained to zone, and anyone was in the courtyard, they had to pin themselves against the walls to avoid aggro after the puller zoned.

Corpse Runs have been removed from the game. It used to be that if a player died, his corpse, along with all his/her weapons, armor and items, remained where he/she died. So if you died in the depths of a dungeon, retrieving your corpse was a very difficult proposition. Plus, in the old days, you could actually have your corpse decay if you couldn't get to it in a week, taking all your stuff with it. Literally many players left the game after losing a corpse in Veeshan's Peak or Kedge Keep or some other difficult dungeon.

That One Boss: Dozens of them, seriously. In an effort to make the game more challenging for the ever-increasing-in-power player base, boss mobs come equipped with debuffs of ever-increasing-nastiness.

Deepest Guk is notorious for how close together the monsters are. It simply cannot be done without an Enchanter to "mez" and prevent "overpulls".

Pretty much any level with a zone-wide debuff. Here's looking at you, Uqua The Ocean God's Chantry.

The raid version of Meldrath's Majestic Mansion was reviled when it was current content due to the ludicrous amount of trash mobs in the zone, as well as ambushes from powerful mobs that would randomly occur whenever doors were opened.

They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Many, many players long, or think they long, for the days when Verant Interactive ran the game, as opposed to Sony.

Inverted considerably when many players attempt to relive the old days on some of the privately-run "pre-Sony" servers that emulate gameplay from the earlier years, only to give up within a few months when the rose-colored glasses come off and they realize that a lot of those "features" they enjoyed back then were really just barely tolerated because there simply wasn't anything more convenient at the time.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy